Friday, October 16

Everyone carries stories that shape who they become. Amber McBride shares the inspiration behind The Leaving Room and explores how writers transform difficult experiences, memories, grief, and change into stories that create connection and understanding. Students identify a meaningful experience, object, place, or memory and begin considering how personal experience can become literature.

What happens when we read hip hop with the same attention we give poetry? Malik-16 takes students inside the language of hip hop to explore imagery, metaphor, wordplay, rhythm, rhyme, voice, and storytelling. Students listen closely, examine how artists build meaning through language and sound, and experiment with creating lines of their own.

What makes a villain unforgettable? Lamar Giles explores how writers create antagonists with motives, histories, fears, strengths, weaknesses, and convictions of their own. Students consider conflict from more than one perspective, develop an antagonist, and begin imagining a scene from that character’s point of view.

What happens when a poet and an illustrator try to outsmart each other in front of a live audience? Chris Harris and Mike Lowery turn words and pictures into a fast-paced improvisational challenge. Students supply prompts, impose creative restrictions, and may join Chris and Mike for rapid-fire word-and-image challenges. Along the way, students see improvisation, revision, risk-taking, visual humor, and creative problem-solving happening in real time.

How does an idea become a graphic novel? Join author Russell Ginns and illustrator Jay Cooper, creators of Super Atomic Wombat Girl, for a hands-on look at how writers and artists build stories together. Students learn how to develop a premise, create a memorable protagonist, build conflict, think visually, and turn an idea into sequential art. Then they begin creating their own graphic novel concept and short storyboard. No artistic experience is required; big ideas and stick figures are welcome!

Inspired by A Hero's Guide to Summer Vacation, Pablo Cartaya turns the classic road trip into a collaborative storytelling challenge. Students help build an unpredictable journey filled with detours, conflicts, strange encounters, family complications, and unexpected decisions. Along the way, Pablo demonstrates how writers use setting, character, obstacles, choices, and consequences to turn a trip from Point A to Point B into a story worth telling.

Every compelling story is shaped by choices. Karina Yan Glaser explores the moments when a character's decision changes everything that follows. Students confront story dilemmas, weigh competing possibilities, and consider how consequences shape plot and reveal character. Then they begin building a branching story of their own.

Inspired by Damsel, Elana K. Arnold explores the stories beneath the fairy tales we think we know. Why do certain ideas about heroes, villains, monsters, power, and happily-ever-after persist across generations? Students consider how contemporary writers can take familiar narratives apart, challenge their assumptions, and retell them from perspectives that traditional versions have ignored.

Friday morning only at Speech, Hearing, and Learning Services (SHLS). Christina Shawn will conduct the VCBF special-needs sessions there. Additional program details will be provided closer to the festival.

Inspired by The Vanderbeekers, Karina Yan Glaser challenges students to solve a community problem with no obvious answer. Teams receive a fictional neighborhood crisis, consider the people affected, weigh competing needs, and develop a plan. Students discover how writers use community, character motivation, conflict, and consequences to build a story.

Every novel is the result of thousands of choices. Should a character tell the truth or keep a secret? Should a story begin at the beginning or in the middle? Pablo Cartaya takes students inside the decision-making process of a novelist and challenges them to experiment with how choices involving character, structure, voice, and conflict can reshape an entire story.

Shakespeare and Tupac Shakur wrote centuries apart, but both used rhythm, imagery, wordplay, conflict, and unforgettable language to examine the world around them. Through performance and close reading, students compare short passages, identify literary techniques, and explore how poetry travels across centuries, cultures, and forms.

Inspired by Everything Sad Is Untrue, Daniel Nayeri explores the complicated relationship among memory, truth, autobiography, and fiction. Students examine how writers transform lived experience into narrative and practice thinking about the difference between factual accuracy and emotional truth.

If your life were a museum, which objects would deserve a place in it? Amber McBride explores how ordinary objects can carry memory, identity, relationships, loss, joy, and history. Students choose an object or memory as the seed for a piece of writing and consider how concrete details and symbols can give emotional depth to a story or poem.

Can you unsettle a reader in exactly 100 words? Lamar Giles leads a fast-paced flash-fiction challenge in which every word has to earn its place. Students explore how suspense depends on pacing, detail, implication, character, and what the writer deliberately withholds. Then they create a complete moment of tension or fear within an unforgiving 100-word limit.

Inspired by Holloway, Elana K. Arnold explores what happens when different moments in history begin speaking to one another. Connecting the COVID-19 pandemic with post-World War II Europe, she discusses how writers weave history, fantasy, and contemporary fiction together to examine grief, resilience, memory, and hope. Students consider why an author might use the past to illuminate the present.

Friday morning only at Speech, Hearing, and Learning Services (SHLS). Christina Shawn will conduct the VCBF special-needs sessions there. Additional program details will be provided closer to the festival.

Memorable characters need more than names, appearances, and personality traits. Amber McBride challenges students to build characters from the inside out by considering what they fear, miss, hide, love, regret, and hope for. Students develop a character of their own and discover how inner life can shape dialogue, relationships, conflict, and the choices that drive a story.

Where do genuinely original ideas come from? Chris Harris invites students into the Department of Ridiculous Ideas, where bad ideas, impossible premises, strange questions, and unexpected combinations become raw material for writing. Students push ordinary ideas beyond their obvious conclusions by changing assumptions, adding constraints, combining things that seemingly do not belong together, and asking increasingly ridiculous "What if?" questions.

Every author begins as a fan. Lamar Giles explores how the books, comics, films, games, characters, and fictional worlds we love can become creative fuel without simply copying them. Students identify what they love about existing stories and begin transforming that inspiration into original characters, conflicts, settings, and ideas of their own.

What do Taylor Swift and William Shakespeare have in common? Across centuries, both have explored heartbreak, friendship, revenge, ambition, jealousy, forgiveness, reputation, and the complicated emotions that make us human. Students actively compare language, imagery, voice, themes, and rhetorical choices through poetry, performance, storytelling, and lyrical analysis.

What happens when a writer and an illustrator have to create a story in real time with an audience making the decisions? Daniel Nayeri and Mike Lowery build a completely original story live while students supply characters, complications, settings, twists, and creative challenges. Students see firsthand how writers and illustrators collaborate, respond to unexpected ideas, revise quickly, and make choices that affect both text and image.

Inspired by The Vanderbeekers, Karina Yan Glaser challenges students to solve a community problem with no obvious answer. Teams consider the people affected, weigh competing needs, and develop a plan while discovering how writers use community, conflict, character motivation, and consequences to build stories.

What do great athletes and great authors have in common? Discipline, creativity, resilience, teamwork, and the willingness to keep working when something does not come easily. Pablo Cartaya joins the Longwood Men's and Women's Basketball Teams for an energetic session connecting storytelling and sports. Students explore the habits, decisions, setbacks, and persistence behind success on the page and on the court.

Inspired by Damsel, Elana K. Arnold explores the stories beneath the fairy tales we think we know. Students examine ideas about heroes, villains, monsters, power, and happily-ever-after and consider how contemporary writers can take familiar narratives apart, challenge their assumptions, and retell them from perspectives traditional versions have ignored.